Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c10.5

c10.5

Notwithstanding the prejudices of the Europeans of last century in favour of their own abilities, some of the first members of the royal society were sufficiently enlightened to consider the East Indies and China & c., as new worlds of science that yet remained undiscovered. They wrote out lists of queries; furnished new heads of enquiry, and seemed extremely desirous of possessing the literary treasures of these unexplored regions of knowledge of which they had formed such sanguine expectations. They failed in these endeavours; it is true, by employing improper means, but the attempt will ever be a monument of the wisdom and public spirit of the employees; and had they not too hastily concluded that to be lost, which nothing but the prejudices of ignorance and obstinacy, had prevented being found; we might at this time [be] in possession of the most finished productions of Asia, as well as of Europe; the sciences might, in consequence, have been carried to a much higher degree of perfection with us than they are at present; and the elegance and superiority of the Asiatic models might have prevented that neglect and depravity of Geometry, and that inundation of Algebraic barbarism which has ever since the time of Descartes, both vitiated taste, and overrun the publications, of most of the philosophical societies in Europe.